More in Movies »

At the Movies

By Lawrence Van Gelder

Published: January 4, 1991

All the World's a Screen

Should it come as any surprise that Peter Weir speaks in screenplay?

"Dissolve to two years later," he said.

Mr. Weir, the Australian film maker whose credits include "Picnic at Hanging Rock," "Witness" and "Dead Poets Society," was talking about how he came to write and direct "Green Card," starring France's ubiquitous Gerard Depardieu in his first major English-speaking role.

"It was a story line I had for some time," Mr. Weir said, noting that he knew English people who had married Americans to obtain a green card, which identifies them as permanent residents and which permits them to work in the United States.

That's what Mr. Depardieu does in the romantic comedy when he weds an American horticulturist (Andie MacDowell) who needs to be married to rent the New York apartment of her dreams. Their marriage of convenience then comes under the scrutiny of the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

"I thought it was a good subject for a film," Mr. Weir said. "I always thought it was a comedy: a marriage being investigated. I know the larger question is a very serious one."

Anyway, the idea lay dormant. Thus the dissolve to two years later. Peter and Wendy Weir are leaving a theater at the end of a film.

"My wife and I were walking out of yet another movie starring Gerard Depardieu, and I said, 'God, I'd like to work with that guy.' And she said: 'Well, you've got that green-card story. Why don't you change it from an Englishman to a Frenchman?' "

Not long afterward, in fact, Mr. Depardieu went to Sydney, Australia, and the director found himself sorely tempted to approach the actor with his idea. But he said he thought that if Mr. Depardieu had any reservations about working in English for the first time, it might be better to try to tempt him with a fully developed idea.

"There was no question from the time I sat down to write that piece that I tailored it for him," Mr. Weir said. "I looked at as many films as I could get on video here in Sydney that I hadn't seen, plus some old favorites, so that as I wrote, I would be drawing on everything I had loved about his many, many performances and character: his charm, his humor, the wonderful mystery that clings about this man.

"I think I became aware as I wrote that this was a chance to introduce him to English speakers who did not go to foreign movies, and therefore did not know his work. Having completed it, I was really painted well and truly into a corner. There was no way I could recast it."

This was in the middle of 1988.

Mr. Weir failed to reach Mr. Depardieu by telephone. Although Mr. Weir had intended to make the film as an independent production, he went to Walt Disney Studios in Los Angeles, planning to increase the appeal of the project to Mr. Depardieu by having guaranteed distribution. Mr. Weir shook hands on a deal with Jeffrey Katzenberg, the chairman of Walt Disney Studios , who suggested that the director fly to France to talk to the actor.

"Gerard and I met the morning after I arrived, and we ended by talking for three days," Mr. Weir said. "He didn't speak much English, and I didn't speak much French. We spoke in these two broken languages, put them together and had kind of one language. The point was, we wanted to communicate."

There was only one problem: Mr. Depardieu was unavailable for a year, being committed to four movies, the last being "Cyrano de Bergerac."

"So I said to him, 'I'll wait, of course.' I was very disappointed."

Mr. Weir went back to Los Angeles. Mr. Katzenberg said he had an idea about the way Mr. Weir could spend his time while waiting for Mr. Depardieu. He handed him a script: "Dead Poets Society."

Now that both "Dead Poets Society" and "Green Card" are on celluloid, Mr. Weir said, "I'm taking a break." He's enjoying summer in Sydney.

"I feel deliciously free," he said. "I think I always do this. There's a pattern where I do two films close together and then take a break.

" 'Green Card' came out of one of those breaks." Specializing in Terror

How is Kathryn Bigelow spending the beginning of the new year?

Putting the finishing touches on "Point Break," a psychological thriller starring two of the hotter actors around: Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze.

"It's a story of survival and enlightenment," said Ms. Bigelow, who came out of the Graduate School of Film at Columbia University to direct the stylish pulse pounders "Near Dark" and "Blue Steel."

In "Point Break," which co-stars Gary Busey and Lori Petty, Mr. Reeves plays a college football star turned Federal Bureau of Investigation agent, and Mr. Swayze is cast as a master surfer called Bodhi, a name that means "enlightened one" to Eastern philosophers.

Assigned to investigate a series of near-perfect bank robberies, Mr. Reeves is called upon to go undercover among the maverick fringe of Southern California surfers, and Mr. Swayze becomes his mentor.

"It's two men who become embroiled in a sort of psychological entanglement that ultimately becomes life-threatening," Ms. Bigelow said.

She said what appealed to her when the project, for 20th Century Fox, came her way was "the juxtaposition of the two worlds: meaning that of the F.B.I., which, in the context of the story, represents the system; the other half being the metaphysical, the psychological, more tribal, primal world the surfers inhabit."

Most of the filming was done in the summer, along the California coast and on the northern shore of Oahu in Hawaii. "We were everywhere there's water that breaks," Ms. Bigelow said.

There are tentative plans for "Point Break" to be released this spring, she said.